Police chief focuses on trust

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ANAHEIM After a tumultuous year in the city, Police Chief John Welter is focusing on building trust in the police within the impoverished neighborhoods during the coming year and moving past the unrest that brought national attention to the city in 2012.

After starting the year with the arrest of a man suspected in a series of high-profile killings of homeless men, Anaheim police spent much of 2012 dealing with continued increases in violent and gang crime, a series of police shootings that roiled the community and heated protests that culminated in a near-riot in the city's downtown.

Welter recently sat down to discuss how he has responded to the community concerns over the past few months, his hopes for increasing the size of a department that has seen the departure of more than 50 officers over the past five years and his efforts to put more officers on the streets.

Looking back at the past year, what lessons have you taken away?

We are starting to come out of the economic downturn, which is big. For the first year in three years, we have seen an increase in staffing, at least budget-wise. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to keep up with attrition, because we are going to lose 12 to 15 people by the end of this year (2012). Crime is, unfortunately, on its way back up, which is a challenge for policing, especially when we have lost cops and resources. The unrest over the summer was troubling, but at the same time, it provided an opportunity for us to reassess how much we are doing in some of these neighborhoods and what we are doing in those neighborhoods.

Obviously, the community concerns and protests garnered the most attention. Leading up to that, did you get a sense that there was something in those areas that was building?

Well, no, I didn't anticipate there would be unrest going into the summer. I do know a number of these neighborhoods are stressed. And I think the economy the last two or three years hasn't helped that. You have parents trying to make ends meet and they can't, or a single parent working two jobs with one, two or three kids, and because of that, they are not around for their children after school to help them with schoolwork. I'm aware that over the last couple of years we are seeing an increasing number of kids dropping out of school, which concerns me. That is why we started GRIP, our gang-reduction intervention. Our parents-helping-parents clubs were out there working well together. Our after-school programs with Cops 4 Kids was working well. Our junior cadet program was expanding, and there were more and more families engaged in that. So I figured that we are doing a pretty good job of providing alternatives to kids just standing in alleys looking for something fun to do. What I didn't realize was the control those gang members had over the neighborhoods.

In the aftermath of that unrest, what specific steps have you taken and the department taken to rebuild that trust with those portions of the community?

One of the things we have done is reached out to a number of different community groups, the neighborhood groups that meet. I've assigned officers to work foot patrol and foot beats, even though it is really not cost-effective given the number of calls for service. We have taken detectives out of investigation to put them in patrol so we can continue to manage our calls for service. We've gone in the neighborhoods with our cops-for-kids program mobile now so that young people and parents see us coming in the neighborhood for something other than trying to arrest someone.

What's the outlook for the budget and police staffing looking forward?

I think the outlook is good. I think we have finally started to turn the corner. But again, we have some real challenges for this council and this government. We've got a number of neighborhoods that are working poor. Every time we see increases and tourists that come to the city, that means more hotels, which is great for our revenue, but also means more workers that are making a minimum wage, and many of these people are raising kids. It's always going to be a challenge for us to find ways to get to the parents and the young people before it gets too far down the road and they can't get out of the gang or violent-crime lifestyle that they get engaged in. But I think our future is bright. Our job here is to not look at the Police Department as “let's build it the way it was.” When we start rebuilding, we need to look at how to be more effective at preventing crime, at engaging the residents to be supportive and not just stand back and be critical of police. The police are only going to be as successful as the community that supports them. And I challenge them when I go to community meetings and they say, “Hey, chief, what are you doing about graffiti or gangs or drugs or burglaries?” I look at them and I say, “Here is what I'm doing, here is what this Police Department – your Police Department – is doing to stop this. What are you doing about it?” Now, how many people did we have demonstrate over officer-involved shootings? I didn't see all these people show up when there was trouble with gang violence going on in these neighborhoods. We need support from parents, from business owners, schools, politicians. If everyone got together behind “Let's start preventing some of these crimes” rather than “Why aren't the police doing more and why are they shooting so many people?” I think we'd be much better off.

With everything else going on, was there anything that you felt was overshadowed?

A good example is the serial killer suspect, where all law enforcement came together and in a short period of time took a serial killer off the street. We have our Cops 4 Kids program. We have Girls Club, which are girls in school who are failing, who are associating with gang members, who are ruining their lives for the long term. Those kind of small wins are overshadowed by what I consider to be a flash-in-the-pan unrest. And it's not that I want to minimize the unrest. I think the unrest was kind of the tip of the iceberg of a lot of problems that are occurring, social as well as others. The police are the face of the community, and so they naturally are going to get the brunt of it. I think the officers showed great restraint at many times and many occasions I saw. We learned some lessons on how to best deploy when you bring a number of agencies from across your county in. You really don't know how they are going to be perceived. Driving down streets in armored vehicles and camouflage and semiautomatic weapons hanging on the side of vehicles, that is not something I expected to see, and when I did see it, I took corrective action immediately. But that aside, I think we've been doing a great job with the limited resources we've had at this department.

What is your focus moving into this year?

My focus is to get us by the unrest, because I still think that is on people's minds as these cases are being released from the district attorney. Some will continue to be upset regardless of the outcome. I look forward to the investigations concluding. But I also realize this is part of our job. We are continually engaged in controversial behavior and activities because that is the nature of the business we are in. I look forward to the opportunity to start rebuilding the department in a new direction, or building it further in the direction we have been heading, with more foot patrols and strategies to interact more with community members so that when there is a shooting – because there will be – or when there are the major narcotics or gang sweeps, people know they can trust the police, and we aren't after kids that are running through the alley playing games. It was very disheartening to hear from people when we went in to do those arrests in the sweep, the rumors that were going around is that the police were in the neighborhood arresting any kids, any young people they could find. My job is to do everything I can over the next year to see that trust is enhanced.

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